I have a web application that exposes webservices, developed in java.
One of the client system is a siebel platform; as they told me, they cannot manage arrays/list of objects.
Which is the best solution to solve the problem?
How should I redesign my services?
Consider that my data structure requirement includes list of objects...
Thanks in advance
The team who are telling you that Siebel cannot manage list of objects within a web service are not telling you the truth. The Siebel application should be able to use your web service definitions to generate a proxy service within Siebel (which creates a Siebel internal web service definitions and integration objects). These need to be compiled into the Siebel srf and mapped to internal Siebel integration objects which in turn need to be related to Siebel Business Objects and components. It is certainly a non trivial piece of development if your team has not done it before but it is entirely possible.
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I am not sure if I am comparing onion with a cabbage. But I am really confused with the portlet and a web service. I know that web service is making your software components in your application as a service to other applications but to me it is similar to a portlet responding to requests. I know that my understanding is making you(Portlet & SAAS developers) really upset. But I need some clarity on this.
Why cannot I use the request-response to portlet work similar to a web service?
If yes, what is the benefit I get in using a web service than a portlet?
If not, then what are portlets lacking to act as a web service?
I am a newbie in portlet development. Please dont curse me for this question.
Please suggest.
EDIT:
Most of the answer say that the portlet is a UI component. My customer has requested me to create a webservice in liferay. So is it to make a portlet as a web service? If yes, can you please provide a pointer or some code snippet?
Addressing your 'edit' specifically with regards to Liferay...
Liferay plugin projects can expose web services without too much work.
The Liferay Service Builder actually has facilities so you can create SOAP web services or JSON web services backed by tables in the Liferay database (and that make queries on existing database tables). In the case of JSON web services, the URL scheme generated is not RESTful (unfortunately), but it is well defined. With a bit of work on your part you can impose Liferay's permission system on web service calls as well.
Here's a reasonable starting point in the Liferay Developer's Guide:
See the links on that page to SOAP and JSON services.
Note that a 'portlet' is only one type of Liferay plugin. The web service facility is part of the service layer - which can be used by many plugin types. So there isn't necessarily a portlet involved in creating a web service in Liferay, you can make a web service that has no visual component associated with it.
Portlets are areas you create to add and display content. Portlets can be added to the left and right of the center body area and can contain myriad content ranging from news, events, calendars, RSS feeds, collections, plain text, and more. Also, you can set properties and policies for showing the portlets.
you want to use portlet when
You have content you want to have special focus, like news.
You need to specify the configuration data for an item. - i.e. number of entries to show.
You want to give the content editors a choice about when and where to display content.
You'd like to show it only to some groups or users.
On the other hand, web services:
Enables applications to expose their services
“progammatically”, i.e. the services can be invoked by programs
Enables software running on other computers (could be a desktop, mobile phone, PDA, etc.) to invoke operations exposed by Web applications
if you are trying to identify the main difference portal historically, the portlets have three layers architechture (client, middle tier, backend) this cause two weakness:
Different portal groups have no well established way of sharing services
Different technologies(Java, Perl, CORBA, EJB) in middle tier.
Different protocols(GRAM, IIOP,...)
Consequently, lots of redundancy, reinvention
Example: batch script generation
so Web services address the service sharing problem and reduces the redundancy.
source1 source2 source3
Portlets are meant to be a user interface component in a portal solution.
Web Services provide functionality to remotely interact with a system commonly using SOAP, REST, JMS or other related
They provide completely separate functions. The closest you get is the serveResource method in portlets. This functionality is used to serve various types of content from a portlet (such as a PDF document or an AJAX response) without the need to perform a full page request.
I currently develop a Web application that can be accessed over HTTP by an Android application or a Web browser. Both user agents basically provide the same functionalities. The Android app calls RESTful Web Services built with JAX-RS/Jersey, while Web pages are Facelets backed by JSF managed beans. I thus consider that there are two types of possible entry points to the Web app. The Web services do all the necessary work (accessing the resources, performing the database operations within DAOs, etc.) and most importantly, they must act on their own. Therefore, they constitute an independent layer.
In order to reuse the code, is it a good practice to call a Web service from a managed bean? Are their life cycle compatible?
The idea is to inject the Resource object into the managed bean (with CDI, but not necessarily) and to call its methods programmatically. The Web service would act as a business delegate (?) to the underlying services.
I widely googled the question but I didn't get a clear answer. I saw some pieces of code where the managed bean invokes a Web service with its URL, but since all my components are located in a single server app, I don't see what prevents me from linking them directly.
Subsidiary question on error handling: I am also annoyed with the idea of catching WebApplicationExceptions from the Web service into my managed bean for returning error messages back to the view (with FacesMessage). My father always told me that I should never catch runtime exceptions...So, is there a good way to handle them correctly?
In this case, you would be better off having the business logic out from the Web Service into "some central shared code". Then, then web services and the managed beans would call into the shared code.
I've put the term "some central shared code" in quotes, as what you use depends on your runtime environment. If you're using a JavaEE container like Glassfish or JBoss, this sounds like a perfect use of EJB and stateless session beans (which are designed to ensure the resources are managed well). You could also use Spring Beans as the shared code and centralize the logic that way.
It all depends on what you find more comfortable from a development and production sense. But both support injection, so both the Web Service and JSF Managed Beans could have the services injected as any other resource.
I am discovering webservices to impliment in my asp.net website. I visited many sites about Why use webservices and read many articles and found out that web services are good when you have something that is used frequently without loading your page.
I want to know some other example scenarios where web services are used.
Whether i can use web services in sending an order form to database or it is just for textbox box auto completion like google and etc.
Note: I know web services can be used from mobile, web or desktop applications.
But My question is When do i use web service in ASP.Net Application?
Some articles read so far
Codeplex
How to create a Web service using Visual Studio.net
w3school
On a Large Scale, Webservices are basically written, when you want to expose your database, your code, to some other user.
By exposing database, means, suppose, you have a large collection of all the pharmaceutical companies in a given region, storing details in db like, medicines they produce, their policies etc etc. And now, you want people to use it(possibly your paid Client, or simply free access to anyone). So what you going to do? Obviously broadcasting working connectionString to your database will be a disastrous move.
So what you do is to make few methods on top of your db i.e. CRUDE operations and expose these methods in your WebService i.e. someone can interact with these methods through a URL and fetch data or send data or both.
Most general use of WebServices is when you want your specific language built( say ASP.NET) logic and data to be accessible to people on different platforms.
Like mobile devices. Their frontEnd is built in fancy framework say like Titanium, but they fetch their data through a Sql Server using WebService built with Microsoft's WCF-Rest approach. They store their data, Synch their data through a WebService.
In a typical example, We had a very large shopping Website, and it was standalone i.e. we were the only users of its database, its data, its users. But then a requirement came, that certain Client wants to model it and make use of its existing data and logic, but they have got JAVA platform. Our entire system was built on ASP.NET 3.5. What to do then. We simply exposed our BAL through a ServiceLayer and gave it a fancy name ServiceBAL and lived (and earned) happily ever after.
These are some business oriented usage of Web Services.
Other simple, mere usage of webService like textBox auto completion, existing user check and so many, am sure, you must have found out during your scout.
Web services are reusable components you can use anywhere. for example suppose you are building order processing system where order can be place by mobile,web etc. So instead of creating a different function for different application or different platform it's better to create a web service of order processing system such as placeOrder or takeOrder web service and consume them on different applications.
Web Services are the means by which devices communicate over the World Wide Web.
Whether you use a mobile application, search engine or an enterprise system, the user piece of the application (the interface) resides on your device.
The data, and potentially the business rules, live on some other server on the network. How your interface communicates with the server piece is the role of Web Services.
I'm learning about web services and most of the resources I've been reading talk about registering your web service once it's ready for use by others. Is registering a web service required to use the service?
For example, let's say I have a web application on a company intranet and I create another web service app that retrieves some sort of useful information to be displayed on this private intranet site. Would this new web service require being registered just so my web app can use it or can the web app simply interface directly to the new web service (following the WSDL file) without the need of some sort of UDDI registry?
You can certainly use the service without the UDDI registry.
I have created several Web Services and have immediately used them without registering them. Registration gives others confidence that your Web Service is legitimate and descriptions of how to interact with those services.
Imagine doing development where you have to register any Web Service before using it. Yikes!
No, not at all.
You are probably talking about API directories you may register your WS at. Like UDDI or what it’s named. Entirely optional.
Nobody uses UDDI anymore. It's an idea whose time has come and gone.
It was thought that there would be public registries of web services that everyone would use to find a web service to meet their needs. That never happened.
How could either the service or the app know whether or not the service was registered?
Furthermore, why would they care?
If you're trying to use service orientation the right way, your web services should be registered within a service registry. The registry should contain the published contract of the services and any meta-data that helps the discovery process.
A different questions is: does a service consumer program need to look up a registry and dynamically bind the service it needs to call? NO, NOT AT ALL.
But then, what discovery process am I talking about?
I'm referring to a human (developer, architect, etc.) who is designing/developing a program that needs to call a service. This person should have means to search what services are available in his/her organization. If not, the benefit of reusing services is compromised.
Discovery is also about humans finding out there's a service somewhere in the IT organization that offers the functionality they want.
In this case, the registry can be as simple as an html report that is created and updated manually or generated by parsing (xslt comes handy) the wsdl files.
A friend wants to consume my ASP.NET MVC 2 application in a similar fashion as adding a web reference to it, accessing my functions, and using my model objects from a .Net web form from a separate website.
Any links out there that could explain how to "dress" my MVC responses so that his server to server consumption would be similar in experience to a web service?
I suggested using System.Net.WebClient to pull the results in to a variable then deserialize the JSON result, but maybe there's a better approach out there?
I'd suggest that you consider an API controller or a separate API application depending on the load you expect from people consuming data from your application. A separate API application will allow you to move it off your application servers if needed.
Rarely, will you find that the data that you would provide via an API is a one-to-one match with what your views need to be rendered. Behind the scenes you could abstract the data generation so that your API and your application controllers reuse the same code to get at the data, but the front-end of the API would understand how to negotiate security (from an API perspective) and present data that is easily consumed by a program. Moreover, you won't find that you're creating extra controllers and methods in your application just to provide some data that will never be used in a particular view.
You could use MVC or WCF for the API and JSON or XML as the payload format. If you use WCF, you get the benefit that he really can simply add a service reference to connect to it without you having to build a WSDL file/action.
From another's advice, Phil Haack added this to MVC 2 Futures. Add the DLL reference to the Application Start, and bingo. It uses a validator.